Politics The Fight Inside Trump’s State Department Is About Power—Not Expertise The president needs diplomats willing to advance his America First agenda. Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images At last count, President Donald Trump had named only nine career Foreign Service officers (FSOs) as ambassadors. Six had been confirmed, while three remained waiting for Senate confirmation. That strikingly small number has predictably put the Foreign Service establishment inside the State Department on the warpath. Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the breakdown was roughly 70 percent career diplomats to 30 percent political appointees. Under Joe Biden, it was about 60–40. Even during the first Trump administration, the split was approximately 55–45. But the second Trump administration is taking a markedly different approach, closely screening each potential career nominee. This has considerably slowed the nomination process, but Trump-friendly State Department insiders say FSO nominees, aligned with administration goals, are in fact being identified. Meanwhile, each embassy without a Senate-confirmed ambassador is being led by an FSO chargé d’affaires.  From the outset, the administration has had two broad foreign-affairs objectives: to integrate national-interest priorities into America’s global engagement and to retool the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery. The fight over the ambassador nominees has to do with both goals. Trump is willing to nominate career ambassadors, but the White House is no longer automatically rubber-stamping and sending the Senate the names produced by the State Department’s traditional internal FSO selection process. Rumors abound inside Foggy Bottom, but the explanation appears straightforward: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House have little confidence in a process too heavily influenced by the Foreign Service old guard. They have no interest in elevating career FSOs who are fundamentally out of step with the administration on foreign assistance, international organizations, visa policy, and other key issues. Many Trump-friendly insiders see the new approach as a necessary step toward breaking the old guard’s grip on Foggy Bottom. It is a strategy for forging a new Foreign Service—one not captured by the globalist and woke values that dominate professional diplomatic services across much of the developed world. The career diplomatic corps in countries like France, Germany, and Britain appear hopelessly lost, but the administration is trying to salvage the U.S. Foreign Service.  In response, the old guard argues that the State Department’s traditional in-house selection process produces ambassadors with invaluable country expertise, extensive international experience, and the judgment to set aside their anti-Trump biases to represent the president faithfully. Tampering with that system, its defenders contend, means passing over seasoned diplomats for less-experienced candidates and replacing professionalism with partisanship. It is a set of clever arguments that contains some elements of truth. But in the current national moment, the principal purpose of these arguments is to block Trump’s international priorities and frustrate badly needed reform of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. The dispute concerns far more than ambassadorial appointments. It is about who runs foreign policy. The old guard is far too savvy to deny openly that presidents—even Donald Trump—constitutionally direct U.S. foreign policy. Its fallback position is subtler: preserve the State Department’s entrenched and self-interested bureaucracy in the hope that things will return to “normal” after Trump leaves office. The Foreign Service’s country expertise, professionalism, and on-the-ground experience are unquestionably valuable assets. But nothing in the Trump-Rubio approach to find reliable FSO candidates, aligned with administration priorities, gainsays those qualities. It would be foolish for any White House not to consider whether an officer is willing to implement the president’s decisions fully and faithfully. The public record suggests that reluctance to do so is widespread among senior FSOs, making many of them poor candidates to serve as Trump’s personal representatives in foreign capitals. Foreign Service old-guard leaders condemn Trump’s approach as “partisan.” But their definition of partisanship is notably fuzzy. It has nothing to do with the Hatch Act, which forbids political electioneering, but largely rests on the assertion that a president has no right to evaluate whether FSOs, based on their past professional performance, are a good fit for senior positions. What triggers the old guard’s charge of “partisanship” is actually a fight about policy; the tactic is a sly attack on the president’s constitutional authority to name the officials who exercise his executive power. In this debate, the old guard refuses to acknowledge an obvious fact of human nature: Veteran diplomats, some with decades of experience, inevitably develop deeply ingrained convictions about America’s core foreign-policy priorities and its mission in the world. Expecting officers who privately (or sometimes publicly) consider Trump fundamentally unfit for office to become his most effective advocates would reveal remarkably poor judgment on the part of the White House. That happened in Trump’s first term. For example, some 1,000 officers formally dissented from the president’s 2017 executive order pausing certain visa processing. Those dissenting officers placed themselves on the State Department’s internal record as opposing one of Trump’s signature campaign policies. In the same manner, large numbers of FSOs have also condemned administration policies on other initiatives, such as the abolition of USAID. Nevertheless, Rubio has permitted some Trump-hostile officers to remain in key positions because they have demonstrated they can perform their duties. But based partly on the resistance Trump encountered during his first administration, the president has concluded that he has a right to expect something better from those chosen to serve as his representatives abroad. To be sure, a significant minority of FSOs welcome the Trump-Rubio initiatives and consider the old guard’s opposition to the administration excessive. That is particularly true when the old guard compares the administration’s State Department reforms to the specter of Joseph McCarthy. In a recent article, former ambassador Bill Burns, a veteran FSO and ardent defender of Foggy Bottom’s ancien régime, made his case: “Things are quite bad,” says Bill Burns, who served in the U.S. foreign service for 32 years including as ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state before heading the CIA under President Joe Biden. Burns argues that Trump’s policies are doing even more damage to the department than the Joseph McCarthy era in the 1950s, when the then senator’s Red Scare campaign led to a loss of expertise on China. “That was on one relatively specific set of issues, and it cost the United States in significant ways for the next 15 years or so until the Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China,” he says. “But this cuts across the board. It’s not just about one region or one set of expertise.” Invoking McCarthyism, even indirectly, is usually a cheap shot. It certainly is here. The implication of Burns’s argument is that inexperienced White House political appointees, if they must serve as senior presidential envoys, should defer to the experts. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff may be easy targets for Burns and his ilk, but their fury over Trump blinds them to contrary historical examples that should give them context. Kushner and Witkoff, for instance, have more international experience than Woodrow Wilson’s Colonel Edward House, who exerted enormous influence over the 1919 Versailles settlement despite holding no elected office, possessing no formal diplomatic rank, and never having served in the professional diplomatic corps. Harry Hopkins had never held a post in the State Department when Franklin Roosevelt dispatched him to London in 1941 as the president’s principal envoy to Winston Churchill and later Joseph Stalin. House and Hopkins both left extensive diplomatic records. Both often disregarded expert advice. The State Department survived. What really bothers Burns and the old guard is not that State Department experts are being ignored. That happens in every administration. In fact, Burns no doubt remembers well when the George W. Bush administration ignored his own advice from Moscow on the red-line dangers of pulling Ukraine too far into the West’s orbit. No, what bothers them is that the Trump administration is attempting to make lasting changes inside the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery. Rubio and his leadership team understand that serving as an ambassador is a crucial credential for FSOs seeking promotion, career advancement, and greater responsibility. Change the composition of the senior ranks, by elevating conservative FSOs focused on America’s national interests, and over time you can remake the institution itself. It is a smart strategy. Recruiting a new generation of junior FSOs while minting a different cohort of senior officers offers a path toward forging a new mindset, culture, and leadership cadre within America’s diplomatic corps. Such an approach can save the Foreign Service by bringing it into step with the nation it represents abroad. The issue is not “partisanship” but values. For decades, the State Department’s machinery has reflexively favored the globalist or internationalist FSO over the America-First officer. Now an administration is trying to rebalance the institution. That this is even a fight demonstrates the power of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. Its leading representatives—whose role in the constitutional order is simply to carry out the work of the national executive, nothing more—are so entrenched, media-connected, and politically sophisticated that they can mount a domestic ideological campaign against a sitting president and his secretary of state. The old guard understands that accepting Trump’s approach would mean surrendering much of its power to shape foreign policy. That is why its members defended the corrupt and dysfunctional USAID dinosaur to the end—and continue to do so. They echo the dire pronouncements of international institutions and multilateral organizations resisting reforms that would end Washington’s subsidization of their budgets and drastically curtail their prerogatives. This is a fight about Washington power, not diplomatic expertise. As one Trump official observed rhetorically: “What is the State Department’s function? It likes to think it’s the foreign policy center. That’s not true. Its job is to represent the president’s foreign policy, not to make it.” That is precisely the issue. The post The Fight Inside Trump’s State Department Is About Power—Not Expertise appeared first on The American Conservative.